May 23, 2011 · 4:53 pm

Sad Songs

Don’t Un-break My Heart

We all have those moments where you feel that little tinge of sadness welling up inside. It starts somewhere in your belly, crawls up to your heart, (which actually hurts) then moves up your neck to behind your eyes. You’re going to cry. But if you wanted to fight it at this point you could and suddenly the process is reversed. You stop that sad thought, you swallow back those tears, the sadness moves back down, un-breaking your heart somewhere along the way and the fist that lives in your belly dissipates. Voila! You’ve saved yourself from a nice big self-pitying cry.

Play It Again Sam

Then there are those other times when you can’t stop the process. Instead of stepping back, you step forward, toward iTunes where you desperately look for that band, that song that’s going to lead you to the edge of wreckless, heart-wrenching sadness. You see the song, you load it up, all the while holding back your tears until you can really let it rip. Wait here it comes, it’s starting up, the first notes, you’re done. The tears quickly turn into sobs.The ball in your stomach gets bigger, your throat constricts, your heart truly has broken in half and your eyes are blinded by gigantic salty tears. That’s it. You reach over and play the song again and again. ..

How Much Sadder Can a Song Actually Get When it’s Called “Sorrow”?

I have a lot of songs that take me there but the one that’s really doing it for me right now is Sorry by The National. If you’re up for it, have a listen here and have a good cry yourself. Better yet, tell me what song brings you to the edge so I can increase my cathartic moments.

The great thing about really letting yourself go to pieces is that it actually helps reverse the sadness process. Suddenly you’ve given yourself over so much  that you actually have nothing left. This is when you switch tunes…maybe Foster the People Pumped up Kicks will help you get a groove on in your day.

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May 20, 2011 · 3:43 am

Poem of the Week: Signing My Name by Alison Townsend

An artist always signs her name,
my mother said when I brought her my picture,
a puddled blur of scarlet tempera
I thought resembled a horse.

She dipped the brush for me
and watched while I stroked my name,
each letter drying, ruddy,
permanent as blood.

Later, she found an old gilt frame
for me at an auction.
We repainted it pink,
encasing the wobble-headed horse
I’d conjured as carefully
as if it were by da Vinci,
whose notebooks on art
she was reading that summer.

Even when I was six, my mother
believed in my powers, her own unsigned
pencil sketches of oaks and sugar maples
flying off the pad and disappearing,
while her French pastels hardened,
brittle as bone in their box.

Which is why, when I sign my name,
I think of my mother, all she couldn’t
say, burning, in primary colors –
the great, red horse I painted
still watching over us
from the smoke-scrimmed cave of the mind,
the way it did those first years
from the sunlit wall in her kitchen.

Thanks to Alison McGhee for lovingly curating these poems each week.

More about Alison Townsend
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

alisonmcghee.com/blog

Manuscript Critique Service:
http://alisonmcghee.com/manuscript.html

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May 16, 2011 · 2:16 pm

When I Grow Up I’m Going To Be…???

PSSST, SHE’S PRINCESS MATERIAL

When I was a little girl I thought I would grow up to be a princess but in retrospect I realize this was more my mother ‘s dream than mine.  It also became clear that she was the only one who thought I was princess material. My brothers and sisters were repulsed by the  notion of ‘me as princess’ and actively discouraged it with various techniques known to families as ‘sibling torture’. This was enough to convince me to pursue another course so I chose the next best thing to princess which was that I would become a ‘stewardess’.  The position seemed to have a kind of elegant gravitas that I was drawn to and my mother told me it was almost the same thing as being part of the ‘jetset’ as she called it.

SERVING OTHERS WAS NOT SUITED TO MY DISPOSITION

But then reality set in and I realized that being a stewardess required flying and serving others neither of which suited my disposition. I suffered from terrible motion sickness and preferred being served rather than serving.

SHE’S GOING TO BE A MOVIE STAR!

So I set my sights with my mother’s approval on becoming a ‘dancer/actress/ movie star’. Why not?. I enrolled in ballet class, took theatre in high school and auditioned for every theatre production possible.But the best laid plans are often put to rest when no real talent exists and when  Mrs. Gigg’s, my ballet teacher,  sunk her treacherous, spidery hands into my ample waistline and declared (loudly)  to the class that I was ‘doughy’., my dreams flew out the window.So  I picked myself off the floor and eagerly set my sites on the role of ‘serious actress’. Continue reading →

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May 14, 2011 · 2:13 pm

The Ultimate Dog Tease: Ridiculously cute dog video

This video was passed around my Facebook page and it’s one of the cutest dog videos I’ve ever seen.

As a disclaimer, however, and having learned my lesson from the John Cleese posting, this video might be old, it may have been made in the 90’s and it could have been ’emailed’ at one time…but dang it, it’s cute, so emjoy.

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May 13, 2011 · 4:48 am

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway: Book Review

The Cellist of Sarajevo follows the lives of three ordinary people during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s. The thread that unifies the three narratives is the cellist, a man who comes out to play Albanoni’s adagio in G Minor for twenty-two days straight to honour the lives of twenty-two needlessly slaughtered innocent by-standers. Continue reading →

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May 8, 2011 · 5:15 pm

White Oleander by Janet Fitch: Book Review

Thanks to Savannah Morin for this guest blog post.

White Oleander is the story of just how complicated, awful and unpredictable youth can be. Astrid is a young teenager with a different sort of Mother; a poet. A painstakingly beautiful, brilliant and convoluted woman, Ingrid, teaches Astrid to think for herself, that loneliness is the human condition and the most awful thing in the world is to be ordinary. Like most young girls, Astrid is fascinated with her mother and only wants to please her. Continue reading →

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May 4, 2011 · 2:08 pm

Poem of the Week: The Lake Isle of Innisfree – William Butler Yeats


I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

—
For more information on Yeats, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/117
—
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

This poem was passed on to me by Blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

Manuscript Critique Service:
http://alisonmcghee.com/manuscript.html

Many thanks to Alison for her curation.

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April 30, 2011 · 11:09 pm

Vancouver Bike Lane Nazi

Here we go. Another joke. This is very entertaining.

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April 25, 2011 · 4:42 pm

Restrepo:Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger

Restrepo, directed by war photo journalist and director Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, is a feature length documentary that captures the everyday life of an American platoon embedded in a remote outpost in the formidable Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Hetherington and Junger spent a year capturing the every day life of 15 soldiers.

Restrepo is a raw and  powerful account of men living in war.  The directors don’t allow political agenda or ego to stand in the way of getting as close to the truth as possible. They simply turned on their cameras, often in incredibly dangerous situations, and showed us how and by whom this war is being fought. Continue reading →

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April 23, 2011 · 1:55 am

My Nasty Web of Easter Lies

It’s funny how you can convince yourself you’re right in the face of evidence to the contrary. It makes me realize just why the French may have gotten confused during the German occupation. Nothing looked normal, nothing was normal therefore everything was normal, hence A okay. This same type of situation happened to me recently. Let me tell you what happened.

It started with my sister saying she was surprising her husband for his 40th birthday with a romantic weekend away to San Francisco. Because we usually have a family dinner over the holiday weekend this was going to be tricky. Continue reading →

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